Back to Normal: AWS Outage Resolved After Causing Worldwide Disruption

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed its systems have 'returned to normal operations' after a 15-hour outage that plunged parts of the internet into chaos, disrupting banks, tax services, and businesses across the globe.

The massive failure in the tech giant's cloud computing network caused widespread turmoil, interrupting payments, websites, and apps that depend on AWS infrastructure used by some of the world's biggest organisations.

In the UK, Lloyds Banking Group customers reported payment issues, while HMRC's website also went down.

According to Amazon's health dashboard, the issue was fully resolved at 6 p.m. Eastern Time after engineers reported that AWS was 'starting to recover' roughly three hours after the problem first appeared. The company said all remaining technical faults had been fixed and promised a detailed explanation of the cause and scope of the outage in due course.

Slow and Bumpy Recovery

Cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple told the Associated Press that the recovery process could remain 'slow and bumpy' as Amazon continues deploying fixes across its global cloud network.

'It's similar to what happens after a large-scale power outage,' he explained. 'While a city's power is coming back online, neighbourhoods may still see intermittent glitches as crews finish the repairs.'

A Familiar Failure

It is not the first time AWS has suffered a major disruption. Its Northern Virginia data cluster, known as 'US-EAST-1', has been responsible for three large-scale outages in the past five years. The site serves as the default region for many of Amazon's cloud services.

The company's worst outage in recent memory occurred in 2021, when airlines, payment apps, streaming platforms, and car dealerships were knocked offline for more than five hours.

Amazon has not yet explained why the same facility continues to trigger widespread failures, though it confirmed that 64 internal AWS services were affected by this latest malfunction.

The Risk of Relying on a Few

The outage underscored how dependent the world has become on a handful of cloud providers. When one fails, much of the internet grinds to a halt.

'This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures,' said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at ESET, in a statement to Reuters.

BBC technology reporter Shiona McCallum added that 'the pressure on cloud services is only increasing all the time and events like these highlight the fragility of these systems.'

Experts say companies themselves must also share the blame. Cornell University computer science professor Ken Birman told the BBC that many firms using AWS 'haven't taken adequate care to build protection systems into their applications'.

He urged developers to invest in reliable backups for mission-critical apps hosted in the cloud to prevent business paralysis when outages strike.

Market Reaction

Despite the disruption, Wall Street barely flinched. Amazon shares closed at £161.58, showing investors remain confident in the company's dominance of the global cloud computing market, even as questions mount about its resilience.